New Places: Stories about being somewhere new

This week we present two stories about being the new one in a new place.

Part 1: After moving to a brand-new school in the seventh grade, Edith Gonzalez struggles to maintain her straight-A status with a new, scary biology teacher.

Part 2: When social scientist Meltem Alemdar leaves her home in Turkey to pursue her education in the US, she struggles to find her identity.

Edith Gonzalez is a native Nuyorican with four graduate degrees in various sub-disciplines of anthropology. By day, she is an historical  archaeologist studying bio-prospecting in the 18th-century English-speaking Caribbean. By night, she has a "slight" obsession with Lord of the Rings, and the dance intersection of late 70's disco and early 80's punk.  She is a veteran of MOTH and Take Two Storytelling  (among others). As a two-time Smut Slam champion, she also enjoys telling dirty stories to a room full of strangers. 

Meltem Alemdar is a social scientist and native of Ankara, Turkey. She came to Atlanta in 2000 to attend Georgia Tech's Language Institute,  then decided to pursue a Master's, and then a doctoral degree.  Dr. Alemdar earned her PhD in Education Policy, with a concentration in  Research, Measurement, and Statistics, at Georgia State University in 2009. She is Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist at Georgia  Institute of Technology’s Center for Education Integrating Science,  Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC). Her research focuses on improving  K-12 STEM education through research on curriculum development, teacher  education, and student learning in integrated STEM environments. Dr. Alemdar has led numerous NSF-funded research projects that spans on project-based learning, STEM integration, engineering education, and  social network analysis. She is passionate about improving K-12 public  education system through her research. 

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